You'd have to be pretty bad with a calendar (and know nothing about games development) to believe that a review written at least six weeks before a game goes gold could be of anything even remotely resembling the finished version. I know for a fact that "Braveheart" was given 95% by one (ahem) reputable UK games rag based on a 10fps demo that crashed every 2 minutes and a promise that the development team was working 20 hour days to get a patch done in time for the boxes hitting the shelves (which was true, but signifies nothing).
Look, picture for a second how this works. A sales weasel turns up from the publisher bearing a package. In the package is a shitty beta version of the game, a promise that it will be fixed (so the magazine won't look like chumps), the advertising material, and a blank cheque. The cheque is ostensibly to pay for the advertising, but the number that goes on it depends on a lot of things. How many eyeballs the magazine is attracting; how understanding the reviewer is going to be about the bugs; how much the reviewer is prepared to just flat out lie; who is buying lunch for who.
The problem is really that the readers put up with it. Specifically, that we reward magazines for running rave review in every issue purely to tempt you to pick them up. Imagine a games mag with the cover page: "All the games reviewed this month suck." Would you buy it? Probably not, but that's exactly the kind of issue you should buy.
You want to know what a game is like? Play a downloadable or cover disk demo, or a friend's copy (local laws allowing, hey ho). Wait until it reaches budget, and see if people are still talking about it. I bought Diablo II + the expansion + Diablo + a strategy guide on Monday, for less than the original cost of Diablo II. Strangely enough, it's still the same game that it was when it first shipped - only without many of the bugs.
Games magazines are an irrelevance now, other than as a means of distributing advertising and cover disks. Online mags are a little better, partly because they don't have print deadlines to hit, but mostly because you can generally read player comments and get a feel for what the title is actually like.
So, we're all invited to the wedding, right I'm allergic to shellfish, if that helps with organising the catering.
Congratulations and all that, but now I'm going home to pull the network cable out of the back of my girlfriends machine until this story drops off the front page.;-p
Well, it was your first post. I always wondered what would finally provoke you into it. Now we know.;-)
To those wondering, user #570 is indeed Kathleen, according to a page at sarcasta.net (that I admittedly can't find right now). It was along the lines of "I have never posted to slashdot, and I never intend to, so anyone claiming to be me is an imposter. If I ever do post, it will be as user #570"
Incidentally, I once posted a suggestion in a story Slashdot's owners running out of money that they could always set up a sarcasta ho cam, linking to the "bountiful bosum" picture. It was modded down savagely as Offtopic, by moderators who clearly had no idea what I was on about. Vindicated! Ah hahahahaha! Now we're all going to be panting after Cmdr Taco's squeeze. You lucky, lucky bastard.;-)
not laying them in the first place is a lot more cost / effort / human-life efficient than removing mines
This report for the US army reckons that the best compromise is to fit an independent 2nd fuse on every item of ordnance, based purely on the cost measured pragmatically in terms of US military casualties from friendly UXO, let alone civilian casualties.
I don't know about the follow up, but I expect that it failed the up-front-cost laugh test based on the simple observation that your ordnance is usually dropped on the other guy in a dusty country, so who gives a damn. Not us, obviously.:(
More than just mines, I hope
on
Robot Mine Smasher
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· Score: 5, Informative
this will help remove mines in Afghanistan, which after 20 years of war has more then a few around
2,000 people a month are killed or maimed by landmines worldwide.
There are 110 million active landmines deployed worldwide.
For every mine removed, 30 more are layed.
Laying a mine costs between 3 and 30 dollars. Removing one costs between 300 and 1000 dollars.
I hope this will be useful for all unexploded ordnance (UXO), not just mines. Iraq and Kuwait are still full of US UXO from the Gulf, and in a karmic twist, this report for the US army actually focuses on US troop casualties (based on Gulf data) as a prime consideration of US UXO, with civilian casualties as an "Oh yeah" afterthought. When even the military starts getting worried about the amount of explosives they're scattering everywhere, it's time to take stock.
Re:The kicker's in the tail
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SuSE 7.3 vs XP
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· Score: 2
Anyone who was moving from WinNT/2k experience to WinXP would find it trivial. I question whether you have a clue if your only previous experience with Windows is Win98
OK, you caught me. Note that I said Win98 to WinXP on "another" machine. Off the top of my head I have: 2 x Win98SE/SuSE 7.3 dual boots (one laptop, one 24/7 DSL router/fileserver), 1 x WinME/WinXP games machine (which has previously been Win98, then Win2K, then back to WinME), 1 x Win98SE machine (technically my girlfriends, but I tech support it). My work machine in NT 4.0. I'm a software developer, and I write the occasional winapp.
My point though is that if you come at WinXP through newbie or Win9x (or "other GUI") eyes, it's just not that friendly, and it tries to hide things that you really need to know about like administrator access, a completely new and alien concept to Jane Homebody. You don't even know how much you don't know until something goes wrong.
Don't misunderstand me, I actually like WinXP now that I've turned most of the bells and whistles off, I just think that the retail version is an awkward compromise between fully featured and user friendly - like KDE/SuSE. As I said, WinXP is still just better, but the gap is closing from both ends.
Heh, that was of course "and to not consider larger and theoretical constitutional issues". I said this was pissing me off, now I can't even type straight.;-)
[The courts] also ruled that it was legally appropriate to prevent a scientist from presenting a paper that explores the inner workings of the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) music encryption system
Oh, way to spread the FUD. Judge Garrett Brown dismissed the Felten case because there was no longer any case to answer. As he pointed out, he was obliged to restrict himself to the immediate and ongoing threat of prior restraint to Felten, and to consider larger and theoretical consitutional issues.
Don't get me wrong. Judge Brown appeared to be incapable of understanding the issue, and would possibly have ruled incorrecly if there was still a case to answer. But there wasn't, so the EFF's assertion that the Felten dismissal was a ruling against First Amendement is a bare faced lie. Their FUD disappointed me at the time, but the fact that they keep harping on and on about it is really starting to piss me off. The EFF are trying to paint what was actually a small victory as a crushing defeat to whip up sympathy and anger. That's the kind of crap I'd expect from the MPAA/RIAA, not from the white hats.
And I was recently delivered C++ code that used a class with a private constructor and const static instances, instead of good old fashioned enums (goodbye switch, hello if/else/if/else/if/else...). I initially assumed that it was a paranoid developer who'd read Effective C++ and didn't want to be passing uninitialised enums around. Turns out that it was written by a Java programmer who didn't know what an enum was.
Java isn't just missing enums, it's beginning to remove them from the developer's toolkit, and that can't be a good thing.
The kicker's in the tail
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SuSE 7.3 vs XP
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Until now, conventional wisdom held that Windows wizards were a key factor in holding down TCO by countering the initial licensing costs with lower maintenance costs and lower skills requirements for the maintainers. OpenBench Labs' initial foray into the unconventional world of Windows XP puts that conventional wisdom about TCO into serious question
Well said. I have to admit, when I moved to Suse7.3 about six months ago, I really missed the handy-dandy pop-o-matic wizards that made Win98 such a no-brainer. It was a bitch having to figure everything out from scratch, with FAQ's either stopping too low down the clue scale or starting too high. I very nearly gave up (as I had done with RedHat 6.x a while back), but I stuck with it, and now I'm starting to get a clue.
Then two months ago, I upgraded from Win98SE to WinXP on another machine. I realised that I was suffering Linux cognitive dissonance (overvaluing the utility of it simply because it was hard to learn), and resolved to come to XP with an open mind. I was particularly looking forward to returning to the "one way to do it, it's our way, and we'll do it for you", which (be honest) is what Jane Homebody or Garry Gameplayer(me on that machine) really needs.
But oh dear. What's with the vile animated crap? How do I turn it off? Stop asking me if I want a passport account. Where's the network info? STOP ASKING ME IF I WANT A PASSPORT ACCOUNT. OK, I've set up TCP/IP, but how do I change the workgroup, it's not on the identification tab any more? STOP ASKING ME IF I WANT A PASSPORT ACCOUNT. Where's my single click interface? Hey, I thought I told you to stop animating those menus. No, I've already set up TCP/IP, stop asking me if I want to set up a connection to the internet. It's right there! STOP ASKING ME IF I WANT A PASSPORT ACCOUNT!
Even coming from Win98SE, it took me a long time to get WinXP set up the way I wanted it. If I'd come in cold, it would have been much worse, because I wouldn't even have known the right questions to ask. In all honesty, it's still a little easier than KDE on SuSE7.3, but it's not much easier. The gap has narrowed significantly, and - significantly - it's narrowing from both ends. Linux distros are getting better, but Windows really has got worse.
By trying to hide the inescapable fact that you do need to know what you're doing with WinXP (as you need to know with Linux), Microsoft has actually made it harder for those who do actually have a clue to drive it. How curious.
The Great Rogerborgio will use his mysterious powers of prediction to determine what will happen in this debate:
Much confusion between strictly limited copyright on specific content (good), unlimited time copyright (bad), the protection of ideas (very bad) or even the protection of markets (pronounced "corruption").
Kindergarten comments about how you need to pay for content, or you won't get good content. Flick through your 100 cable channels. Find the one channel with quality original (first showing) content. Explain why you are paying for 100 channels at that moment, or why the good content should only get 1% of your money. You're not paying for content, you're paying for access to 100 channels running commercials intersperced with "content breaks" to keep your eyes on the screen. The model is already broken. Advertisers or marketing execs decide how much money we're going to give them, then the content producers churn out exactly enough content to convince us that we've got our money's worth.
Much ranting about fair use by people who have never so much as read a brief overview of it, and who probably don't even know how copyright actually works.
"Write your elected representatives" / "Don't write your elected representatives, they're all corporate whores, do XYZ instead" / "Stop writing this on here and go do something useful" / "No, you go do something useful" / "No, you go do something useful" (...)
Much sound and fury about IP in general, none of which will translate into WIPOUT essays.
Flame away, but far better if you get over to WIPOUT and actually write it down where someone other than the/. regulars might read it.
Personally, I'm against the 'war on drugs', but I don't think a totally unregulated drug market would be a good thing either. Are non-chemical psychological 'drugs' really that different?
Different from some chemical drugs, but not the ones you might think.
Alcohol, nicotene and caffiene are all highly toxic and physiologically addicting. When you come off them, you suffer physical (not just psychological) effects. That's what makes them so hard to kick.
Cocaine on the other hand, is not physiologically addicting. You'll miss and crave the hit it gives you, but you have to go through the sweats and shakes. You might start using it again, you might even take to crime to do it, but you'll do it through conscious choice.
In that respect, EverQuest's nickname of EverCrack is quite appropriate. You'll miss playing it. You'll miss the good feelings and memories that you associate with playing it. But you should be able to come off it quickly, and with no harmful effects in the short or long term, if you want to.
Incidentally, if this sounds like I'm advocating cocaine over alcohol, nicotene or caffiene, I am. Ask a casualty doctor about alcohol, or a ward doctor about nicotene. Caffiene in the same quantities as cocaine will kill you stone dead. We only tend to think of it as harmless because we take it in small and well controlled amounts, and it's cheap and uncut with random crap.
In fact, it's binge abuse of any drug that damages you (physically and socially) and over use of an expensive drug (note: the illegality causes the cost) that damages society through crime. There's a similar argument to be made for game playing. Small and regular never hurt anybody. It's when you play for hours or days, igoring friends and family (and perhaps work) and your health, that it becomes a problem. Unfortunately, immersive and flat fee games like EverQuest are exactly the sort of games that can facilitate this damage.
Note: facilitate. I'd no more try to ban something like EverQuest than I would cocaine. The problem is the people with addictive personalities, not in the addicting substance. However, I would (given World Dictator powers) try and encourage light use. Bells and reminders, a need for characters to sleep in real time, perhaps (maybe, possible) even an enforced daily, weekly or monthly time limit, although that would be a last resort and probably counterproductive.
you need criteria the helps differentiate between "pay Mythic XX dollars" and "don't auction your goods for real money."
Hmm, let me see:
"pay Mythic XX dollars": Mythic is party to the transaction.
"don't auction your goods for real money": Mythic is not party to the transaction, either directly or indirectly through loss of income. If both parties follow through with the actions from the auction, there is a small state change in Mythic's database, but nothing is added or removed. If Mythic sold items to players, there would be an indirect interest, but they don't, and there isn't.
And please deal with the issue I raised about actions versus objects. The in-game result of an auction is that I click "drop item". That's it. That is the single, solitary point where the out-of-game interaction involves Mythic. Perhaps you could come up with criteria that explain when Mythic's client should second guess the motivation behind that action and either drop the item, refuse to drop it, remove it from the game world or whatever.
This challenge looks pretty ridiculous to me. It seems basically to me like people disputing the right of a sports league to ban players for taking bribes to throw the game
Remind me, how much do professional athletes get paid? How much do MMORPG players get paid? What's that you say? MMORPG players pay to play? But that would turn your analogy on its head, surely?
<sarcasm> aside, I am tempted to agree with you, but the problem is that what people are really buying and selling is not items but in game actions (which is why your analogy is actually a good one, as it's behaviour based). If items were being added or removed from the game universe, fair call. But if I walk up to Wizard Bob and drop my Sword of Scolding, what business is it of the game administrators why I did it? Maybe it's because he paid me. Maybe it's because I like him in game. Maybe it's because I like him out of game. Maybe it's because I'm drunk. Any way you like it, it's my business and Bob's business, and as long as we're both using the in game system that they provide and we pay for to perform the in-game transaction, what's happening out of game is none of their damn business.
I'm waiting for a company to not only make a game like Everquest or DaoC, but enforce roleplaying so that idiots running around going, "d00d, the sword will spawn soon, let's get it!" are simply slain irrevocably and directed to read some "don't be an idiot" FAQ
EQ already mandates that your character name has to be "fantasy genre" (by which they mean generic psuedo-euro-mediaeval fantasy), but not a trademarked name. To me, that sucks major weenie, because everyone ends up with doofus names like "Gandolf" and "Al'k'lhrzar", rather than perfectly provenancable mediaeval European names like "Jonathon Archer" (but "Jon'thon Ar'cher" would probably be fine, simply because it's stupid).
What exactly do they achieve with that? Well, they piss off players, they limit your degree of association with your character, and they spend time and money having admins enforce it, when they should be tracking down serial pkillers or bugs. Nobody wins.
In principle, I agree with you. In a free-to-join, free-to-play environment (like traditional MUDS), it's workable. In a commercial game, where people have paid for access and have expectations of service (both reasonable and unreasonable), it's asking for trouble. What MMORPG could afford to kick off half of its players?
After looking at how long it took me to get to lvl 40 in everquest (7 months of hardcore play) I would much rather pay 600 dollars for a 40th lvl character with decent gear than play through the tedium and hell levels
Pish tosh. You wouldn't have paid that money up front because you had no big time investment in the game, and you won't pay it now because you've already put in the time investment so you don't have to buy a character.
Here's the one clear message that EQ can take from your confused statement. You gave them your money for seven months, and you have another $600 to spend on Everquest. Sure, it might be broken, but it's good enough to get and keep you hooked.
It's nice to see that the europeans (at least France, Germany and the UK) have the guts to stand up to Microsoft and consider alternatives. Why isn't this happening in the US?
Bear in mind that this is a protest against the German government's reliance on closed source (i.e. Microsoft), not a statement that Germany is open source friendly.
Perhaps the difference between Germany/Europe and the USA is that Europeans are more inclined to take their grievances straight to their (federal) parliament rather than to their local (state) representatives. I'm not making a value judgement about either system, just mentioning that the USA is more region/state-oriented than most European countries.
Incidentally, the statement in this petition that the UK is pro-open source is highly spurious. The British President - sorry, sorry, technically he's still known as the Prime Minister - is so pro-Bill that it's actually embarrasing. Some UK government departments have made noises about looking at open source, but that mostly seems to be a negotiating tool to get cheaper Microsoft licenses, just as the mention of the UK leading the way in open source in this petition is intended to stoke the fires of Anglo-German rivalries. Politics, all politics.
Re:Speck of dust, speck of dust, like a broken rec
on
Clear Hard Drive Mods
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· Score: 3, Informative
I have a drive which failed (IBM 75GXP!) but has data on it which I would like to recover. However, I can't afford those ridiculously overpriced data recovery services. I assume you swapped platters of identical models.
Yes, two identical IMB Travelstars. Same size, same model number. One ticked and burped on startup, the other had a password lock on the platter (which the controller knew about, and so wouldn't play ball). They were bought as seen on eBay for next to nothing, so I didn't expect them to work, and really had very little to lose.
Isn't the 75GXP the model that a lot of people had problems with? And the problem was with the physical platters breaking down? I'm not sure what you'd gain by moving the platters to a new drive, unless you know that it's the head, arm or motor that's screwed. In the first instance, you could try the controller from an identical drive. Swapping platters really is the last resort of the desparate, I think.;-)
If people knew they could take a platter with data they needed, and move it to a working drive for $200 (the cost of a new drive), they wouldn't spend THOUSANDS to have a company do it for them. [...] How many of you who claim a clean room is needed, have ever TRIED taking apart a HD, and putting it back togerther? I have, and it worked fine
I'll back that up, and I'll report success on actually swapping platters between identical 2.5" HDD's, with exactly zero hygiene precautions. In fact, I was eating lunch at the time. A turkey and salad ciabatta, if I recall, onions but no coleslaw. Both drives were effectively unusable, I really had nothing to lose, and it was just a fun piece of lunchtime surgery.
To my immense surprise, six months down the line, I have one working hard drive, no bad sectors.
Perhaps we were both immensely lucky. I certainly wouldn't advise opening a drive that you couldn't afford to lose. But if it's a old drive, or a dead drive and you can't afford the retrieval fees, give it a go. My personal experience is that it's not as hopeless an operation as the speck-of-dust brigade would have you believe.
Speck of dust, speck of dust, like a broken record
on
Clear Hard Drive Mods
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm sure there will be many people screaming "But a speck of dust can wreck your hard drive!", and a few personal experiences of horror stories of drive damage. Here's my personal experience:
I have seen a new hard drive, untampered and sealed, run for 18 months, then start to lose sectors gradually. After about 3 full months, it had lost about 25% of its capacity and the owner gave up on it. At that point, we opened it up for a post mortem, and a tiny pile of grit fell out. The top platter was visible scored and marked... and it was still 75% usable.
I have personally swapped the platters on two 2.5" HDD's (from one with a broken arm to one with a hard ass password lock stored on the platter). Both drives were effectively write-offs, so I didn't even bother with the bathroom trick and had them open for about an hour at work, during lunch, with greasy fingers and food crumbs everywhere. To my great surprise, the result was one working HDD, no bad sectors, six months and counting. I trust it exactly as much as I trust new sealed drives, which is to say: not at all.
I'm sure that there are plenty of counter-stories, but it's my (limited) experience that even the most extreme manufacturing defect won't necessarily kill your drive immediately, and that if you've got an old drive you don't mind losing and fancy playing with, go on and have a poke around. At the very least, you'll get the pleasure of having friends and co-workers do a double take and begin the shrieking mantra of "Speck of dust! Speck of dust! Speck of dust!";-)
seems to me like someone just took an old notebook apart
Yup, it's a crippled notebook or a fancy removable HDD. Considering how much this will cost, and that it needs full docking stations at both ends to make it usable at home/office (and anywhere else you go), you'd probably be as well buying two complete desktop system (at a much lower price for the same spec) and adding a removable HDD. The advantage of the super-removable-HDD is that it carries its own OS and apps, but there's nothing stopping you doing that with a normal removable HDD with two similar desktop systems, or running VmWare and mounting your portable OS/apps as a virtual machine for that matter.
Perhaps we're getting the wrong idea though. They're talking about using it as more of a super-but-crippled-PDA for hotel checkins and such. Say what? So, it's like a PDA, only there's no way to use it on the move, which really means that it's like a super-smart credit card, only stupidly expensive and much bigger and less convenient?
Sound to me like a cool toy without any real application. I kind of want one, but I don't really know why.;-)
Timothy, get that compulsive knee jerking seen to
on
Berlin's Robotic Pub
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· Score: 3, Troll
the part I find disturbing is the fact that the owner plans on webcamming the security cameras so you can check on who's at the pub
You do know what "pub" is an abbreviation of, right? Public house.
I'll (selectively but honestly) pick one definition of public:
Open to the knowledge or judgment of all
Get a clue, get a life, get a job, get a haircut, whatever. But do yourself a favour and don't write single sentences that highlight that you're either trolling or a moron. Although I concede, that's not necessarily an "or" proposition.
Here's the problem: this is a residential service, marketed at Joe Clueless. If you've ever talked to a broadband provider's residential tech support, you'll know what I mean.
The reason that's a problem is this: how many residential users keep track of the traffic received at their cable modem or ADSL socket?
My ZoneAlarm firewall tracks usage, but only between restarts (and they don't want me online 24/7, right?). OK, duMeter does better, but I have to remember to reset it every month. And that still doesn't tell me the whole story about the billable traffic to the modem that gets stopped before it reaches my firewall. Because I was looking over the engineer's shoulder when he installed it, I know there's a web interface to it on 192.168.100.1, and I remembered to turn off explicit proxying (because my cableco's transparent proxy is broken and has been for over a year) so I could view it, but, lo and behold, it doesn't hold traffic figures.
So the basic answer is: I don't know how much traffic I've used. And I've got a fair idea what I'm doing. Joe Clueless has no chance. What if Joe is on the receiving end of a DOS attack? What if Joe sets up a Win9x install which makes his windows shares accessible by default and gets used as a server by warez kiddiez? Sure, then it's Idiot Rash, but this service is being marketed to idiots. That's not supposition, all residential broadband is explicitely targetted at clueless newbies who the provider hopes won't use it and won't know (or care) about what's actually going on at their access point.
So while it's fair enough to bill on usage, I'd like to see more broadband providers run a two tier service. That doesn't mean just billing differently, it means providing a cheap but safe nanny service for Joe (proactively scanning his machine for vulnerabilities and snail mailing him about them), while at the same time billing me more for providing direct access to 2nd tier tech support, not the front line minimum wage phone drones with half an hour of training and an overdose of attitude.
I've had cheap residential cable modem access for over a year. During that time the service has been erratic, the support dreadful. I'm ready to pay more for a better service, to move up to a business rate, but my provider won't let me. What's wrong with that picture?
Slashdot Mirror
You'd have to be pretty bad with a calendar (and know nothing about games development) to believe that a review written at least six weeks before a game goes gold could be of anything even remotely resembling the finished version. I know for a fact that "Braveheart" was given 95% by one (ahem) reputable UK games rag based on a 10fps demo that crashed every 2 minutes and a promise that the development team was working 20 hour days to get a patch done in time for the boxes hitting the shelves (which was true, but signifies nothing).
Look, picture for a second how this works. A sales weasel turns up from the publisher bearing a package. In the package is a shitty beta version of the game, a promise that it will be fixed (so the magazine won't look like chumps), the advertising material, and a blank cheque. The cheque is ostensibly to pay for the advertising, but the number that goes on it depends on a lot of things. How many eyeballs the magazine is attracting; how understanding the reviewer is going to be about the bugs; how much the reviewer is prepared to just flat out lie; who is buying lunch for who.
The problem is really that the readers put up with it. Specifically, that we reward magazines for running rave review in every issue purely to tempt you to pick them up. Imagine a games mag with the cover page: "All the games reviewed this month suck." Would you buy it? Probably not, but that's exactly the kind of issue you should buy.
You want to know what a game is like? Play a downloadable or cover disk demo, or a friend's copy (local laws allowing, hey ho). Wait until it reaches budget, and see if people are still talking about it. I bought Diablo II + the expansion + Diablo + a strategy guide on Monday, for less than the original cost of Diablo II. Strangely enough, it's still the same game that it was when it first shipped - only without many of the bugs.
Games magazines are an irrelevance now, other than as a means of distributing advertising and cover disks. Online mags are a little better, partly because they don't have print deadlines to hit, but mostly because you can generally read player comments and get a feel for what the title is actually like.
I found this interesting artist's impression of how the giant fossil creature may have looked.
So, we're all invited to the wedding, right I'm allergic to shellfish, if that helps with organising the catering.
Congratulations and all that, but now I'm going home to pull the network cable out of the back of my girlfriends machine until this story drops off the front page. ;-p
Well, it was your first post. I always wondered what would finally provoke you into it. Now we know. ;-)
To those wondering, user #570 is indeed Kathleen, according to a page at sarcasta.net (that I admittedly can't find right now). It was along the lines of "I have never posted to slashdot, and I never intend to, so anyone claiming to be me is an imposter. If I ever do post, it will be as user #570"
Incidentally, I once posted a suggestion in a story Slashdot's owners running out of money that they could always set up a sarcasta ho cam, linking to the "bountiful bosum" picture. It was modded down savagely as Offtopic, by moderators who clearly had no idea what I was on about. Vindicated! Ah hahahahaha! Now we're all going to be panting after Cmdr Taco's squeeze. You lucky, lucky bastard. ;-)
Grammar remains optional though: "I love you more then life itself"
Still, at least that we we know it's genuine and not a script kiddie hijack. ;-)
This report for the US army reckons that the best compromise is to fit an independent 2nd fuse on every item of ordnance, based purely on the cost measured pragmatically in terms of US military casualties from friendly UXO, let alone civilian casualties.
I don't know about the follow up, but I expect that it failed the up-front-cost laugh test based on the simple observation that your ordnance is usually dropped on the other guy in a dusty country, so who gives a damn. Not us, obviously. :(
Some factoids from the Gruaniad:
I hope this will be useful for all unexploded ordnance (UXO), not just mines. Iraq and Kuwait are still full of US UXO from the Gulf, and in a karmic twist, this report for the US army actually focuses on US troop casualties (based on Gulf data) as a prime consideration of US UXO, with civilian casualties as an "Oh yeah" afterthought. When even the military starts getting worried about the amount of explosives they're scattering everywhere, it's time to take stock.
OK, you caught me. Note that I said Win98 to WinXP on "another" machine. Off the top of my head I have: 2 x Win98SE/SuSE 7.3 dual boots (one laptop, one 24/7 DSL router/fileserver), 1 x WinME/WinXP games machine (which has previously been Win98, then Win2K, then back to WinME), 1 x Win98SE machine (technically my girlfriends, but I tech support it). My work machine in NT 4.0. I'm a software developer, and I write the occasional winapp.
My point though is that if you come at WinXP through newbie or Win9x (or "other GUI") eyes, it's just not that friendly, and it tries to hide things that you really need to know about like administrator access, a completely new and alien concept to Jane Homebody. You don't even know how much you don't know until something goes wrong.
Don't misunderstand me, I actually like WinXP now that I've turned most of the bells and whistles off, I just think that the retail version is an awkward compromise between fully featured and user friendly - like KDE/SuSE. As I said, WinXP is still just better, but the gap is closing from both ends.
Heh, that was of course "and to not consider larger and theoretical constitutional issues". I said this was pissing me off, now I can't even type straight. ;-)
Oh, way to spread the FUD. Judge Garrett Brown dismissed the Felten case because there was no longer any case to answer. As he pointed out, he was obliged to restrict himself to the immediate and ongoing threat of prior restraint to Felten, and to consider larger and theoretical consitutional issues.
Don't get me wrong. Judge Brown appeared to be incapable of understanding the issue, and would possibly have ruled incorrecly if there was still a case to answer. But there wasn't, so the EFF's assertion that the Felten dismissal was a ruling against First Amendement is a bare faced lie. Their FUD disappointed me at the time, but the fact that they keep harping on and on about it is really starting to piss me off. The EFF are trying to paint what was actually a small victory as a crushing defeat to whip up sympathy and anger. That's the kind of crap I'd expect from the MPAA/RIAA, not from the white hats.
And I was recently delivered C++ code that used a class with a private constructor and const static instances, instead of good old fashioned enums (goodbye switch, hello if/else/if/else/if/else...). I initially assumed that it was a paranoid developer who'd read Effective C++ and didn't want to be passing uninitialised enums around. Turns out that it was written by a Java programmer who didn't know what an enum was.
Java isn't just missing enums, it's beginning to remove them from the developer's toolkit, and that can't be a good thing.
Well said. I have to admit, when I moved to Suse7.3 about six months ago, I really missed the handy-dandy pop-o-matic wizards that made Win98 such a no-brainer. It was a bitch having to figure everything out from scratch, with FAQ's either stopping too low down the clue scale or starting too high. I very nearly gave up (as I had done with RedHat 6.x a while back), but I stuck with it, and now I'm starting to get a clue.
Then two months ago, I upgraded from Win98SE to WinXP on another machine. I realised that I was suffering Linux cognitive dissonance (overvaluing the utility of it simply because it was hard to learn), and resolved to come to XP with an open mind. I was particularly looking forward to returning to the "one way to do it, it's our way, and we'll do it for you", which (be honest) is what Jane Homebody or Garry Gameplayer(me on that machine) really needs.
But oh dear. What's with the vile animated crap? How do I turn it off? Stop asking me if I want a passport account. Where's the network info? STOP ASKING ME IF I WANT A PASSPORT ACCOUNT. OK, I've set up TCP/IP, but how do I change the workgroup, it's not on the identification tab any more? STOP ASKING ME IF I WANT A PASSPORT ACCOUNT. Where's my single click interface? Hey, I thought I told you to stop animating those menus. No, I've already set up TCP/IP, stop asking me if I want to set up a connection to the internet. It's right there! STOP ASKING ME IF I WANT A PASSPORT ACCOUNT!
Even coming from Win98SE, it took me a long time to get WinXP set up the way I wanted it. If I'd come in cold, it would have been much worse, because I wouldn't even have known the right questions to ask. In all honesty, it's still a little easier than KDE on SuSE7.3, but it's not much easier. The gap has narrowed significantly, and - significantly - it's narrowing from both ends. Linux distros are getting better, but Windows really has got worse.
By trying to hide the inescapable fact that you do need to know what you're doing with WinXP (as you need to know with Linux), Microsoft has actually made it harder for those who do actually have a clue to drive it. How curious.
The Great Rogerborgio will use his mysterious powers of prediction to determine what will happen in this debate:
Flame away, but far better if you get over to WIPOUT and actually write it down where someone other than the /. regulars might read it.
Different from some chemical drugs, but not the ones you might think.
Alcohol, nicotene and caffiene are all highly toxic and physiologically addicting. When you come off them, you suffer physical (not just psychological) effects. That's what makes them so hard to kick.
Cocaine on the other hand, is not physiologically addicting. You'll miss and crave the hit it gives you, but you have to go through the sweats and shakes. You might start using it again, you might even take to crime to do it, but you'll do it through conscious choice.
In that respect, EverQuest's nickname of EverCrack is quite appropriate. You'll miss playing it. You'll miss the good feelings and memories that you associate with playing it. But you should be able to come off it quickly, and with no harmful effects in the short or long term, if you want to.
Incidentally, if this sounds like I'm advocating cocaine over alcohol, nicotene or caffiene, I am. Ask a casualty doctor about alcohol, or a ward doctor about nicotene. Caffiene in the same quantities as cocaine will kill you stone dead. We only tend to think of it as harmless because we take it in small and well controlled amounts, and it's cheap and uncut with random crap.
In fact, it's binge abuse of any drug that damages you (physically and socially) and over use of an expensive drug (note: the illegality causes the cost) that damages society through crime. There's a similar argument to be made for game playing. Small and regular never hurt anybody. It's when you play for hours or days, igoring friends and family (and perhaps work) and your health, that it becomes a problem. Unfortunately, immersive and flat fee games like EverQuest are exactly the sort of games that can facilitate this damage.
Note: facilitate. I'd no more try to ban something like EverQuest than I would cocaine. The problem is the people with addictive personalities, not in the addicting substance. However, I would (given World Dictator powers) try and encourage light use. Bells and reminders, a need for characters to sleep in real time, perhaps (maybe, possible) even an enforced daily, weekly or monthly time limit, although that would be a last resort and probably counterproductive.
Hmm, let me see:
"pay Mythic XX dollars": Mythic is party to the transaction.
"don't auction your goods for real money": Mythic is not party to the transaction, either directly or indirectly through loss of income. If both parties follow through with the actions from the auction, there is a small state change in Mythic's database, but nothing is added or removed. If Mythic sold items to players, there would be an indirect interest, but they don't, and there isn't.
And please deal with the issue I raised about actions versus objects. The in-game result of an auction is that I click "drop item". That's it. That is the single, solitary point where the out-of-game interaction involves Mythic. Perhaps you could come up with criteria that explain when Mythic's client should second guess the motivation behind that action and either drop the item, refuse to drop it, remove it from the game world or whatever.
Remind me, how much do professional athletes get paid? How much do MMORPG players get paid? What's that you say? MMORPG players pay to play? But that would turn your analogy on its head, surely?
<sarcasm> aside, I am tempted to agree with you, but the problem is that what people are really buying and selling is not items but in game actions (which is why your analogy is actually a good one, as it's behaviour based). If items were being added or removed from the game universe, fair call. But if I walk up to Wizard Bob and drop my Sword of Scolding, what business is it of the game administrators why I did it? Maybe it's because he paid me. Maybe it's because I like him in game. Maybe it's because I like him out of game. Maybe it's because I'm drunk. Any way you like it, it's my business and Bob's business, and as long as we're both using the in game system that they provide and we pay for to perform the in-game transaction, what's happening out of game is none of their damn business.
EQ already mandates that your character name has to be "fantasy genre" (by which they mean generic psuedo-euro-mediaeval fantasy), but not a trademarked name. To me, that sucks major weenie, because everyone ends up with doofus names like "Gandolf" and "Al'k'lhrzar", rather than perfectly provenancable mediaeval European names like "Jonathon Archer" (but "Jon'thon Ar'cher" would probably be fine, simply because it's stupid).
What exactly do they achieve with that? Well, they piss off players, they limit your degree of association with your character, and they spend time and money having admins enforce it, when they should be tracking down serial pkillers or bugs. Nobody wins.
In principle, I agree with you. In a free-to-join, free-to-play environment (like traditional MUDS), it's workable. In a commercial game, where people have paid for access and have expectations of service (both reasonable and unreasonable), it's asking for trouble. What MMORPG could afford to kick off half of its players?
Pish tosh. You wouldn't have paid that money up front because you had no big time investment in the game, and you won't pay it now because you've already put in the time investment so you don't have to buy a character.
Here's the one clear message that EQ can take from your confused statement. You gave them your money for seven months, and you have another $600 to spend on Everquest. Sure, it might be broken, but it's good enough to get and keep you hooked.
Bear in mind that this is a protest against the German government's reliance on closed source (i.e. Microsoft), not a statement that Germany is open source friendly.
Perhaps the difference between Germany/Europe and the USA is that Europeans are more inclined to take their grievances straight to their (federal) parliament rather than to their local (state) representatives. I'm not making a value judgement about either system, just mentioning that the USA is more region/state-oriented than most European countries.
Incidentally, the statement in this petition that the UK is pro-open source is highly spurious. The British President - sorry, sorry, technically he's still known as the Prime Minister - is so pro-Bill that it's actually embarrasing. Some UK government departments have made noises about looking at open source, but that mostly seems to be a negotiating tool to get cheaper Microsoft licenses, just as the mention of the UK leading the way in open source in this petition is intended to stoke the fires of Anglo-German rivalries. Politics, all politics.
Yes, two identical IMB Travelstars. Same size, same model number. One ticked and burped on startup, the other had a password lock on the platter (which the controller knew about, and so wouldn't play ball). They were bought as seen on eBay for next to nothing, so I didn't expect them to work, and really had very little to lose.
Isn't the 75GXP the model that a lot of people had problems with? And the problem was with the physical platters breaking down? I'm not sure what you'd gain by moving the platters to a new drive, unless you know that it's the head, arm or motor that's screwed. In the first instance, you could try the controller from an identical drive. Swapping platters really is the last resort of the desparate, I think. ;-)
I'll back that up, and I'll report success on actually swapping platters between identical 2.5" HDD's, with exactly zero hygiene precautions. In fact, I was eating lunch at the time. A turkey and salad ciabatta, if I recall, onions but no coleslaw. Both drives were effectively unusable, I really had nothing to lose, and it was just a fun piece of lunchtime surgery.
To my immense surprise, six months down the line, I have one working hard drive, no bad sectors.
Perhaps we were both immensely lucky. I certainly wouldn't advise opening a drive that you couldn't afford to lose. But if it's a old drive, or a dead drive and you can't afford the retrieval fees, give it a go. My personal experience is that it's not as hopeless an operation as the speck-of-dust brigade would have you believe.
I'm sure there will be many people screaming "But a speck of dust can wreck your hard drive!", and a few personal experiences of horror stories of drive damage. Here's my personal experience:
I have seen a new hard drive, untampered and sealed, run for 18 months, then start to lose sectors gradually. After about 3 full months, it had lost about 25% of its capacity and the owner gave up on it. At that point, we opened it up for a post mortem, and a tiny pile of grit fell out. The top platter was visible scored and marked... and it was still 75% usable.
I have personally swapped the platters on two 2.5" HDD's (from one with a broken arm to one with a hard ass password lock stored on the platter). Both drives were effectively write-offs, so I didn't even bother with the bathroom trick and had them open for about an hour at work, during lunch, with greasy fingers and food crumbs everywhere. To my great surprise, the result was one working HDD, no bad sectors, six months and counting. I trust it exactly as much as I trust new sealed drives, which is to say: not at all.
I'm sure that there are plenty of counter-stories, but it's my (limited) experience that even the most extreme manufacturing defect won't necessarily kill your drive immediately, and that if you've got an old drive you don't mind losing and fancy playing with, go on and have a poke around. At the very least, you'll get the pleasure of having friends and co-workers do a double take and begin the shrieking mantra of "Speck of dust! Speck of dust! Speck of dust!" ;-)
Yup, it's a crippled notebook or a fancy removable HDD. Considering how much this will cost, and that it needs full docking stations at both ends to make it usable at home/office (and anywhere else you go), you'd probably be as well buying two complete desktop system (at a much lower price for the same spec) and adding a removable HDD. The advantage of the super-removable-HDD is that it carries its own OS and apps, but there's nothing stopping you doing that with a normal removable HDD with two similar desktop systems, or running VmWare and mounting your portable OS/apps as a virtual machine for that matter.
Perhaps we're getting the wrong idea though. They're talking about using it as more of a super-but-crippled-PDA for hotel checkins and such. Say what? So, it's like a PDA, only there's no way to use it on the move, which really means that it's like a super-smart credit card, only stupidly expensive and much bigger and less convenient?
Sound to me like a cool toy without any real application. I kind of want one, but I don't really know why. ;-)
You do know what "pub" is an abbreviation of, right? Public house.
I'll (selectively but honestly) pick one definition of public:
Get a clue, get a life, get a job, get a haircut, whatever. But do yourself a favour and don't write single sentences that highlight that you're either trolling or a moron. Although I concede, that's not necessarily an "or" proposition.
Here's the problem: this is a residential service, marketed at Joe Clueless. If you've ever talked to a broadband provider's residential tech support, you'll know what I mean.
The reason that's a problem is this: how many residential users keep track of the traffic received at their cable modem or ADSL socket?
My ZoneAlarm firewall tracks usage, but only between restarts (and they don't want me online 24/7, right?). OK, duMeter does better, but I have to remember to reset it every month. And that still doesn't tell me the whole story about the billable traffic to the modem that gets stopped before it reaches my firewall. Because I was looking over the engineer's shoulder when he installed it, I know there's a web interface to it on 192.168.100.1, and I remembered to turn off explicit proxying (because my cableco's transparent proxy is broken and has been for over a year) so I could view it, but, lo and behold, it doesn't hold traffic figures.
So the basic answer is: I don't know how much traffic I've used. And I've got a fair idea what I'm doing. Joe Clueless has no chance. What if Joe is on the receiving end of a DOS attack? What if Joe sets up a Win9x install which makes his windows shares accessible by default and gets used as a server by warez kiddiez? Sure, then it's Idiot Rash, but this service is being marketed to idiots. That's not supposition, all residential broadband is explicitely targetted at clueless newbies who the provider hopes won't use it and won't know (or care) about what's actually going on at their access point.
So while it's fair enough to bill on usage, I'd like to see more broadband providers run a two tier service. That doesn't mean just billing differently, it means providing a cheap but safe nanny service for Joe (proactively scanning his machine for vulnerabilities and snail mailing him about them), while at the same time billing me more for providing direct access to 2nd tier tech support, not the front line minimum wage phone drones with half an hour of training and an overdose of attitude.
I've had cheap residential cable modem access for over a year. During that time the service has been erratic, the support dreadful. I'm ready to pay more for a better service, to move up to a business rate, but my provider won't let me. What's wrong with that picture?